Friday, September 9, 2016

The futile quest to identify pop music's greatest year

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, September 7.)

There seems to be some sort
of contest underway to determine the most significant year in the history of
pop music. Over the past year or so, several music writers have submitted their
nominations.

For Andrew Grant Jackson, it
was 1965. The American writer’s book 1965:
The Most Revolutionary Year in Music fastens onto the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul, the Rolling Stones’ hit (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and the Dylan
album Highway 61 Revisited, on which His
Royal Bobness, realising that pop stars had much more fun than earnest folkies,
re-invented himself.

British writer Jon Savage
opts for the year that followed. In 1966:
The Year the Decade Exploded, he examines the significance of the milestone
Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds, the
emergence of New York proto-punk band the Velvet Underground and the powerful influence
of drugs, notably LSD, on pop music.

Now we
jump to 1971. Another British writer, David Hepworth, suggests this was the
year when the pop music era ended and the rock era began, although the distinction
is entirely artificial.

In Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year that Rock
Exploded (note the nod to Savage’s title) Hepworth bases his case, less
than persuasively, on a series of unconnected developments: Don McLean’s American Pie, David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Rod Stewart’s Maggie May and Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Good luck finding
any commonality in that lot.

Now
someone named James Woodall has got in on the act. In the British magazine The Spectator, Woodall makes a case for
1976, pronouncing that it “left a more multifarious pop and rock legacy than
any year I can think of”.

Again,
his reasoning his less than convincing. Certainly, 1976 was the year of the Sex
Pistols, when the primitive thrashings of punk challenged the increasingly
bombastic excesses of mainstream rock, but that’s about it.

Other
than that, Woodall can justify his choice only on the basis that several
singers – Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Dylan and Bowie – produced records in 1976
that became his personal favourites. That doesn't make it a watershed year for anyone other than him.

What
emerges from all this is that it’s possible to choose almost any year since the
start of the rock and roll era (however that’s defined – I’ll come back to that
later) and argue, on the basis of a few cherry-picked examples, that it
was some sort of milestone.

In any
case, I read somewhere recently – I think it may have been in Flying Nun
Records founder Roger Shepherd’s entertaining book In Love with These Times – that everyone is convinced the music of
their own youth is the greatest of all time, and I think that’s probably true.

The
teenage years tend to be the time when music leaves its deepest imprint because
emotions are intense at that stage of our lives and we’re at our most
impressionable.

As it
happens, I too would mount a vigorous case for 1965 or 1966 (my own teenage years) as the greatest
years in pop music, although probably not for the same reasons as Jackson and
Savage. It was a time when pop music was not only reaching new heights of
sophistication, but branching off into multiple new directions.

But even I can't be emphatic. Which was the greater Beatles album: Rubber Soul or Revolver, which came out the following year? My answer tends to depend on whichever one I'm listening to at the time. And anyway, what about Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was issued in 1967 and arguably represents the apotheosis of pop creativity?

The truth is, no one can say with pontifical certainty that there was a single greatest year.

I suspect an element of commercial opportunism behind the current spate of pop histories. Particularly among affluent baby boomers, there’s a hunger for nostalgia about pop culture and a desire to revisit their glory years.

It’s also
apparent that there’s some convenient historical reinvention going on. Music
writers are very good at retrospectively reading profound significance into
historical events and making them fit whatever cultural narrative happens to be
fashionable.

The
emergence of the Velvet Underground, for instance, is reverentially treated as
a development of almost biblical significance, although it went virtually unnoticed
at the time other than by the arty New York elite. Even now the band remains
essentially a cultish fascination, worshipped for reasons that have little to
do with music.

Besides, all
these books bypass what were arguably the most significant years of all: the years when rock and
roll came into being. That’s probably because the precise origins of the genre
are hard to pinpoint.

Conventional
wisdom has it that it all began in 1955 with Rock Around the Clock, by Bill Haley and his Comets, but this is
where it gets complicated.

Haley
wasn’t really a true rock and roller; his background was in country music. His
band was originally known as Bill Haley and the Saddlemen.

Contrary to popular belief, Shake, Rattle and Roll (1954) was Haley's first rock and roll hit. Rock Around the Clock was first
recorded in the same year and went to No 1 only after it featured on the soundtrack of
the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle.

Was
it genuine rock and roll? Most musicologists accept that it was, but to my ears Haley’s hits owed more
to the black jazz genre known as jump blues.

I would
argue that it wasn’t until Elvis Presley stormed the charts in 1956 with Heartbreak Hotel that what we now
recognise unmistakeably as rock and roll penetrated the commercial mainstream. But
even then, Tutti Frutti by the wild
black rocker Little Richard beat Presley to the punch by several months.

In any
case, rock and roll wasn’t new. Black audiences had been listening to similar
music for years. All Presley did was make it palatable to white ears.

For the
true source of rock and roll, you have to go back at least as far as 1951 – to Rocket 88, by Jackie Brenston and his
Delta Cats (who were, in reality, Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm) – and even
further. As I wrote in my recent book A Road Tour of American Song Titles, I defy anyone to listen to the young Fats Domino singing The Fat Man in 1949 and tell me it’s not
rock and roll.

But no
one, to my knowledge, has written a book devoted to 1951, and still less 1949,
as the defining year of rock and roll. Could it be that we’re still
perpetuating the cultural conceit that it was a white invention?

5 comments:

Sounds a little like an old Guys competition. I liked it when we started getting music videos on the box. I am stuck in a time warp over here in Bangkok, the taxis play Carol King, I heard one driver humming to Electric Light orchestra, and the fake blonde Thai girls bounce to 70's music on the breakfast show.

God I love Spotify! I was able to quickly listen to Jackie Brenston's 1951 hit 'Rocket 88', which you mentioned. And I discovered that the long intro to that 45's flipside, 'Come Back to Where you Belong', is almost identical to the instrumental, 'Night Train', which came out in the same year and became a hit in 1964 with the Bill Doggett version. Who ripped off whom?

Agree that this is pointless but still a great column. Must throw in 1974 when krafterk might have ushered in Electronica, and 1982 as possibly the birth of hip hop (Grandmaster flash). But 1976 gets my vote for obvious reasons re punk/alternative

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.